The Army and Air Force are shrinking overall magazine shelf space by a third to make room for more electronics, as the military store chain deletes 891 titles from its stock, including the Saturday Evening Post in addition to Playboy.

“Magazine sales are on a sustained downward trajectory due to the proliferation of digital delivery,” said Lt. Col. Antwan Williams, spokesman for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service. “The exchange, as a government entity, is operating in a fiscally constrained environment that requires it to shrink expenses while growing sales and earnings.”

National adult magazine sales figures back up the Army and Air Force business case.

Penthouse circulation plummeted from nearly 1 million in 1998 to 109,792 today, a 89 percent decrease. Playboy is performing better, but its monthly circulation average of 1.3 million in the first half of 2012 compares to 3.1 million in 1997. That’s a 58 percent decrease.

From the viewpoint of Morality in the Media, any distribution of what Trueman describes as pornography is damaging. The group casts the Pentagon’s sexual assault problem as a reap-what-you-sow situation after the Defense Department chose not to remove adult magazines following the 1996 law.

“Those people who look at pornography on a regular basis become desensitized to sexual exploitation,” said Trueman, former chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s child exploitation and obscenity section. “When you demean people by treating them as just sexual objects, it has an effect on you.”

Morality in Media also has asked the Pentagon to ban pornography on personal computers or phones while on a military base.

Trueman said the group isn’t alone in these requests. He said while Internet porn may be seen as a stress reliever during an overseas deployment, it can have long-term effects.

“We know of many people who contact us and say that their spouse got addicted to pornography, and some men have written us saying they have gotten addicted to pornography while away on military deployments,” the Morality in Media president said.

His supporters will continue to press the Defense Department on the issue of adult content.

And Congress may join them. The Senate Armed Services Committee markup of the 2014 defense authorization bill directs the Pentagon to report back to lawmakers on how it is complying with the ban on sexually explicit material.